How does my metaphysical work affect me and inform me at this point in my life? What am I learning from interacting with other dimensions? I have pulled together a few articles, letters and/or essays that are collections of the lessons, thoughts, experiences, and gifts that have been given to us, to my family, my friends and to me since around 1995. 

Abstract and Intro remarks

Re: the following articles about insights or theories on life, death, troubles, cycles and meaning 

This article reflects where my thinking has taken me lately, given my opportunities to talk to beings in other realities as well as this one. As I talk to teachers and commentators in spirit forms, my world view and understanding is definitely evolving. And as I read what other psychics metaphysical students are learning in their interactions and practices, (similar to a  “lit search”) I find that some discoveries dovetail nicely. However, I am finding that many of my cases often do not fit with what those writers report. So, always, more exploration is warranted. Since many of the ideas in the articles below are not expressed in a similar way elsewhere, I cannot refer you to books or works by others at this time. However I like to mention names of writers who are influential to me, so I will cite other works along the way, as much as seems appropriate. 

One place where I differ from other metaphysical writers is the concept of what the ego does and does not do. I am not comfortable with the popular bashing of the ego, exposing it as a sick and selfish form that is only an obstacle to one’s spiritual growth. I see ego as an effective and terrific instrument of growth. It’s a great virtual reality trick. One can live as if she or he is not-god. It also makes us believe we are alone, we are apart, we are unique, and we have that “I am not you” thing that provides us with infinite interactions with this world and many worlds.  So as not-god and not-you (in my carefully crafted little persona, aka ego) I am an entity who can be and do countless marvelous things. This opens up lots of possibilities. I defend the ego and preserving it as long as it serves you. It can be dropped and one can move on to other forms of life as well. But it should not be cursed while you are in it. It is a good trade, full enlightenment for short term ignorance. 

I also defend troubles and problems. They give us gifts and forms of love that heaven cannot give us. Or could it be that earth is actually an alter-heaven? It is where the smorgasbord continues. The menu of agonies and the menu of ecstasies are the endless options for us divine chillens. We are brave and curious  little souls who are actually powerful experts in love, especially the hard stuff. As God’s babies, we have absolute privilege. Our wishes and whims will not be denied. The universe is here to serve our every desire. So, if trouble has visited us, it must be for some reason, for some benefit, for some good. There is a love story in there somewhere.  

Maybe these short pieces will match with your next evolving direction of spiritual thought as well. If you discover some elements that jibe with your experience and you think it would help me in my explorations, please feel free to write to me about what you are doing.  

Apart – ness, Defending the Mess We Are In! 

First, the more common thinking might be summed up as, “oneness is goodness.” But what about Oneness? Of course oneness with others is and can be an ultimate thrill. Realizing oneness feels like love at its very highest point – melding together is the fulfilling moment. One heart beat. One breath. Me in and you out All is together and is right. All is good this way. It feels like the quintessential happy ending. We become one and the story ends. Ahhh.  

Let’s rave about oneness even more. As we roll out the raptures about oneness, it feels right and even righteous. It feels Divine and blessed and worthy of our life long goal. Oneness feels like going home. To see the oneness of all things is enlightenment – a true reflection of a higher reality. Mystics get this. Searchers yearn for this. Devotees who feel they have found this union with God commit to this. They are willing to trade away, gladly, all aspects of the regular, secular and self-ish material lives for the feeling of belonging and being at one with the Divine source of all souls. Giving up the charade and trickery of apart-ness and accepting the oneness of all things, that sounds like nirvana. Therein lies fulfillment, peace, harmony and wholeness. Yeah, these things are cool too, if you like that sort of thing.  

Knowing that oneness and union are possible and believing that they are the ultimate natural experience of love-in-the-act-of-being-itself seems to be a universal part of the core human knowing and human desire. This desire seems to drive us into movement. Also, it is related to the big hurt of human experience, the gnawing homesickness we all feel for this ultimate union state of love. As humans, a desire is left unfulfilled. A need is unmet. Deep in our psyches and in our oldest histories, that oneness is the paradise we apparently lost. Gone is the one loving state where I know who you really really are and I love you for it. In fact, in that state I love you so much that I am you and you know me so much because you are me, and we know that we know! We are from the same loving vibration. Flickerings from the same flame. The beat is us. The vibe is love. We could not hurt each other, miss each other or in any way be anything less than fully loving beings to each other. We know so much, too much.  

For today’s talk, let’s agree that union with love, or awareness of our historical union with our Divine loving roots, is the overarching condition of our heavenly home. When we are aware of our shared heritage we are totally in a state of knowing the full expanse of love from which we have all come. No harm can be done. As heavenly children we know the pure intention of all actions and the consequences of all actions. There is no guesswork. There is no apart-ness, no ignorance about the incredible effects we have on each other.  

Better than mind meld. Better than hearts converging. Better than shamanic merging with other beings, other life forms, other forms of love. This Divine kind of love is the ultimate state of happiness, peace and fulfillment. And yet it has limits. It cannot provide the full experience or expression of love. Some kind of deepness of love comes from loving through and around hardships. Loving in spite of obstacles and in the company of pain, that is a nobler and deeper expression of love. Loving from a distance and loving in and through states of blinding anger, suffering, stress and hurt, those are the big loves that transform us and transform the lives of others. We, brave do-ers of difficult love, we can demonstrate what it really can do! For instance, if I wanted to show I love you, to prove my love for you, to test and stretch my love for you, I might  want to do so by serving you in your times of need or struggle. Or I would ask you to ask me some favor so I could execute it with devotion – act out my love for you. Love craves expression. It is dynamic. That kind of expression could not happen in heaven. We/I/you do not “need” there.  

Only conditions of ignorance and hostility can bring on the full array of love in its many forms, even darker forms, into the realm of experience. Only the conditions of ignorance and hostility can cause us to need each other, to suffer and rise above it, to have the thrill of discovery and learning. In the union heaven described above, all of that is irrelevant. It is not the same to love a person with all knowledge about them, while all are living in a state of bliss, with awareness of how Divine company works already. It is a bigger deal to love them, other souls, other beings, when they are injured, unlovable in form or action, or in a state of significant imperfection. If they are gripped in the jaws of a condition where they do not demonstrate the love back, we can show our love still. Because heaven, as defined above, cannot produce the struggles and the environment that is hostile or hurtful to us, it cannot let us create millions of important manifestations of Divine love. We need another place. Heaven is not all it is cracked up to be. Yikes.   

So, if the heavenly all-knowing gives us some kinds of love, but still misses a lot of the power of what love can do, then how do God’s Babies press on? (I heard the term, “Godlings,” and liked the image, so I’ll use that term here.) How do we go out and dabble in the things that Godlings do; tasting, creating and evolving love in all its forms? How do we/they get to express love in the deeper, heavier, indelible, more noble and more important ways? How do we get to satisfy our curiosities and our divine impulse to act out love? 

Well, we get a “place”, another kind of heaven, an advanced more complex version of it. It’s not for lightweights. It is for heroes and sheroes who want to express love in the ways that truly expand the capacity of the heart. It is the wide range of humanity. We get to take a life form, a persona, an ego, and live this way that is limited, quirky, weak and even chronically, hopelessly annoying. We give up knowing it all, willingly and gladly, for the many gifts that not-knowing will provide to us. We get to live as if we are this unique, individual and incomplete unit. We get to live under the conditions of extreme ignorance about our larger higher selves, and our true heritage.  

Think of how cool this is. Here we live as crippled persons who are in a world that seems to have lost love, lost paradise, lost the eternal peace that seems to be our rightful heritage. Struggle is everywhere. Personal suffering is everywhere. Aloneness and loss are a constant. Fear is pervasive here. Uncertainty thrives and tests us, always. Getting and losing, getting and losing again seems to be the futile cycle of sadness around us. Yup, earth is the perfect place for the trials that make the divine souls really happy – where love, in the strongest forms, gets to be played out and fully experienced from all sides. We live love--Having it, losing it, transforming it, it transforming us, etcetera, etcetera. Earth has a touch of heaven and it has a goodly bit of non-heaven. Or is it really alter-heaven? So earth plane is where the real action is.  

A confounding paradox comes up to bite us at this point. The two heavens, the happy one with all knowledge and blending, and the hostile one, with its torments and heartbreak, they are in collusion. They are partners. There is pressure from above and below, so we are suspended in an inter-place where these opposites can both affect us at the same time. All of this thrilling, merging, melding and ecstasy of oneness is possible, all of this loving, sharing, creating and growing is possible, all of this interaction and deepening of the soul is possible because the opposite heavens are both true. Some say they even occupy the same space. (However space is a condition of this plane for good reasons as well. More on this later.) In the inter-place called earth, we are spirits that are heaven sent and we are beings who are human bound. We are close cousins to angles and animals (another whole menu for souls that will be addresses at another time.) At some point we truly feel, believe, perceive and live as if, “This is me. And I am not you. And that is important.” So I need to feel apart from you, and you need to be apart from me, much of the time, in order to make this work.  

This not-you thing opens doors. Now we can relate.  We can release, leave and reconvene. It is imperative to the joy of union and reunion. The not-you thing allows for hearts to be units of their own, as lonely and as powerful roaming forces. Then the single hearts can blend and not blend. Ecstasies abound. The apart-ness, the aloneness, the singularity, they are also sweet and blessed and freeing. The not-you and not-me thing allows the thrills of Divine Love to unfold, grow, whither, be reborn, and continually reveal themselves. Huh? So, it is the hard stuff that makes this a good place? And what about the good parts? The beauty and perfections that we see and worship all around us here on earth, where do they fit in? For one thing, they make this place feel at home enough to withstand the hard times. The goodness here, and the potential for goodness here, makes us want to try to make things better.  

Now that I live as if I am not you, I can experience inside my head and I can stretch my heart without you intruding in there. I feel secret and untouched. Or I feel touched. I feel selective. I can avoid the higher wholeness that is yours and mine, with that Divine knowledge and love and wisdom. I can experience as if I am me and only me – a stranger in a strange land reaching for love and living a search for it in forms that are only available here in the hard parts, the spiritual badlands. This me, this collection of quirks makes up my claim on uniqueness. This personality seems recognizable to others who have gotten used to me. This identity is comprised of my testy idiosyncrasies and my irksome habits. This small and unknowing me is stumbling around this planet as if I am not the planet, or of the planet, as if I am not all the beasts and beings, as if I am not the many forms of life here, and as if I am not you. The ego is silly at times. Other times it is riddled with demons, fears and petty problems. But it is precious for the gifts it brings. Dissolving it may bring you back to a higher awareness about who you are. However, I ‘d say, do not curse the ego. It is the unseemly and priceless instrument to act out through, to play in, to bring the Divine heart to new levels of expression. So survival of the ego may seem to keep you from Godly awareness for a while, but it’s temporary. That ego, an instrument of apart-ness, brings you to a whole world and back again. Only its odd and stubborn shortcomings can provide the setting for the love in the form that is not available in heaven or to the celestial beings.  

And more to drive home this point. You are not me. You are thanking Goodness and the angels above, you do not have my annoying ways, my trying tendencies and my aggravating excesses. Hooray that you are so much more…and so much less… and so different in so many ways. You are so much better at… you are, well, in a word  “yourself.” This wedge between us, this bothersome blockage that truly convinces us that we are not the same person, this gives us the many possibilities to interact with each other in ways that could not happen in heaven. The menu here, on earth as “one-ables,” gives us an explosion of fabulous options. Roles we can have are male, female, mother, lover, warrior, protector, hero, doctor, patient, healer, student, needy, and on and on. 

Now, in this irritable fussy little form, I can be quite agitated with others. I can resent you and have harrowing conflicts with you. We can disagree. My beliefs can crash into your beliefs. We can come to a full fight about religion, politics, values and style. We can resent each other for our views on progress and corruption. We can call each other names and point out flaws in each other’s faces, cultures and preferences.  We can even ratchet the heat up to a full hate. We can dabble in racism, even violent toward each other. War seems do-able when we are not the same “one.” Imagine being able to be consumed with hate for one of your brother/sister/godling/selves. Hate is non-love, or anti-love, or loss of love, or a call for love. It can only happen here. Then there is love/hate combo, a passion-riddled hybrid that can bring on even more wild and wonderful experiences. The menu of agonies (or are they ecstasies?) grows even larger still.    

What helps to convince me that you and I are not one, not even much alike? Well, as we have seen, irritability helps a lot. It helps to keep us away from our other natural tendency to blend into one. Also time is a construct that really works well here. We can track how we feel apart from others. For instance, I can say I am so different than you because I am older than you, or we have grown apart because I have not seen you in 15 years! Or I can live and believe that I will never see you again and live as if you would never affect me again. I can sense and live in a “without you” world. Time is a great reality maker for us. Time is a set-up as we set out to live. We live as if we are a life form and as if love is constrained to a certain form. As if! That is what makes live lush and wonderful. It is the shrinkage, the compartmentalizing, the fragmentizing of our higher selves into puny pesky egos, that is what makes it all work. It is the reduction, the shaping and reshaping of love that lets us fully taste love. We test love, grow it, expand it. We can isolate love. What a marvelous concept! I can have the kind of love affair that makes me feel as if this one person is the only one who truly make me whole and full and right with the world. I can love like a mother does, feeling the absolute responsibility for the life of another being. O I can love like a daughter does, grateful to and resentful to the parents at the same time. As if! That is what is so cool about earth. We can live here “as if…” 

Also space is a great facilitator for this apart-ness experience. I can say you are hundreds of miles away from me, so I miss you so much. Long distance love. Stretching love. Seeing what love feels like without the object of love being on hand. I can see, really see and believe that love survives and grows. Or I can see how other love fills the void, so as one form withers, another form of love swells the heart back up again. We see this often. Like, as the widow lives on, alone after 50 years, she becomes passionate about gardening and finds ways to grow beauty and health and produce love in this world through service and attention to her plants. Or like the dancer who lost her legs in an accident becomes an extraordinary painter or a public motivational speaker. Her passions find their artistic outlets.    

So, let me set out and review some assumptions here. You are a child of God. I am a child of God. We are the precocious kids, the cuddly offspring, the brilliant progeny, the godlings of the Divine Supreme Being. The Origin of all things, the All That Is ties us to our lineage. The Universe is created as our workshop. It is our lab. It is our nanny, teacher, provider, and playground. It is our love nest and host to our new adventures. We create here. We experiment here. We experience here. A few things are very handy about the universe: We desire, the universe delivers. We are the ultimate spoiled brats of the cosmos. The most privileged of the privileged. Imagine such a heritage. The poetry of Hafiz goes into raptures about the love life of Godlings and the absurdity of our troubles quite often. Our family tree and this universe, a garden of wonders, are so “beyond the beyonds!”  

This line of thinking obviously does not work for atheists and agnostics. For them, if my theory is right, I would assume they want to live this way. As higher beings they chose to live as if there is no divine oversight or connection. Like the old TV ad where the kids says, “Mother please! I’d rather do it myself.” The atheists get that. The Universe does not deny us anything. If we want it, we get it. A higher level makes the decision. This brings up “free will.” I believe that our higher self can choose a path and our local consciousness has to live with those conditions, even though the local ego would never have chosen this condition. In other instances, the local guy, the ego, still gets to create, choose and bring things to him or herself using the powers she or he has access to. The spirits I talk to say that about 35-40% of life is set up by the higher self, so these events are pre-determined and will happen. The rest is up to the individual to attract or select the things in life that lead them into more chapters in the love story. The whole convoluted thing is a fantabulous love story, across worlds and dimensions.  These ideas are explored more in the article on life Themes.

About our menus, if we want to fight with authority, we can pledge to keep the commandment to obey our parents and then have a knock-down, irreconcilable conflict that lasts a life time with our Dads. Perhaps we are truly brave and want to taste a high-end, extreme conflict or fear. Fear of God, fire and brimstone religions, and/or religious wars provide here. We can see what existence would be like with the idea that our divine God is not only a being with personality, but one who is angry with us, who would test and judge us, deem us to be not good enough. He is capable of sending us to an intolerable and an eternal hell for the terrible behaviors so we deserve this kind of treatment. Or they can believe that God wants them to kill someone else. Those kinds of extreme experiences are for the real thrill seekers, the ones who like to dabble in many forms of ultra fear. They must like the rush of it. I call them the “bungee jumpers” of the soul state, the bravest or reckless among the little Godlings. They not only visit the haunted houses of the universe for a scary experience, they live as if they have offended God and are going to face unthinkable consequences. Wow. They’ve got guts.     

So, the story ends with a happy ending, when we pass on from this persona, this ego we so carefully developed and tested and drove out into the planet. The body of the form of love dies off and the form of love, with all its creativity and lessons and building up of love-based, though often regret-filled events, the spiritual version of the chapter of the love story is preserved. The story comes from the fact that we came here at all. The adventure is the human story, the never-ending love story. We are all chapters and cast-members.  

So, I am defending the foibles of our petty little ego-centric selves. I stand up for our silly egos. I say yes, let’s keep hanging on to the empty little canisters as if they are all that we are. Rejection of others is good, well at least it is useful. Rebellion against whatever is “not right” to your way of thinking, that is fine. We need to carve out little bits of life to indulge in, dabble in and plunge into. And so we need to turn away from all the rest of the goings on that are happening around us. They are for others. While we are living as if we are these little quirky vessels, we have access to types of love that are not found anywhere else. It is in the midst of the smallness that we can reach the deepest largeness of the divine heart. I am saying that the ridiculous oddities and the challenging shortcomings make us fight and find each other intolerable from too close a range, by design. It is by design that we are so testy and feisty and hard to get along with. And it is by design from our older deeper divine roots, that we cannot live without each other either. We are hardwired to hook up and unite and serve each other. At the same time we tend to push others away. Ah, The push-me-pull-you conundrum that is our daily human life!  

But then, if all that lif-is-love-so-it-is-good stuff is true, why does the world feel so sucky so much of the time? Why does my life feel like crushing disappointment, like a desperate struggle to eat and survive? Why do my relationships feel like a series of momentary highs and then torturous misunderstandings? Why do I feel like I am alone in this place, and the other beings are quite incapable of “getting” me, who I am and what I am saying. Why do I dread each day at 4 a.m. and need to pray for hours in order to find it worth my time to go to work?  It is hard to swallow the idea that trouble is my new best friend. But that is what I am discovering. 

Let me make a clearer case for trouble.. Trouble is vitally important on our planet. We are specially designed for it. We must have problems here. They serve us tremendously well. We get to be heroes, sheroes and freedom fighters. We get to be good guys. We get to challenge corruption. We get to face off with un-fairness. We come to the rescue of others. We thank them for being willing to be in peril so that we can act on our good intentions to save, protect and provide for each other. These are typical forms of love. The planet has a specialty. And that is trouble. Humanhood has a special purpose – to tangle with trouble. Trouble is interesting, inspiring, exciting and a great motivator to get in the game. Trouble pushes us to try harder, to dig deeper and love unconditionally under circumstances that seem impossible for us. The humans come here to relish in the interactions with trouble, to struggle, to solve, to invent new solutions and new trouble. Each generation inherits their global issues. As one generation experiences that they left their mark by resolving one kind of trouble, a new generation of trouble is handed to the next generation, The children may get a world free of one kind of danger only to be engaged in another critical danger. Souls who come here will not be denied.  There are always big issues to engage in.  

It is being in the service that matters, not having the final results. This idea might be hard for task oriented people. The do-ers are wired differently than the be-ers among us. It is the engagement that is where we act out our humanity and our divinity. This service thing comes up in an interesting way. My brother lives on an ashram. The saint who leads the devotees is always coming up with new construction plans. This gives the do-ers something to do. This is their way to provide a service to the holy man and to earn grace by doing it. So the trouble is needed so that the opportunities for service are there. Then there are problems that arise and folks get to step-up to be a part of the solution “for the saint” or “for the community here.” It’s a great set-up for these acting out love-as-service scenarios. I am told that at times the guru, the beloved spiritual leader, throws his back out, just when there is a chiropractor in the house as a guest that day! How coincidental. This is really a set up so that the fellow gets to serve the holy man. He gets to come close and do a service and the holy one gets to pass on the special gifts of grace that he is endowed with. It’s a wonderful little dramatic and comic love story, isn’t it?  

Even if we look at other texts about teachers, prophets, divine beings among us, like the story of Jesus, we see that he does not eliminate trouble from the path of the followers. He just encourages them to make choices around love and kindness to others. As we help the poor and down trodden, he says we also are helping him. So the idea of value inherent in the trouble is not new. I think there is a counter argument that can be persuasive, and has been pervasive. That is, if you are good and worthy, God will bless you with successes and a good life. So those who gain material success and outward appearing blessings, might be likely to think they are the favored sons and daughters and they somehow deserve what they got. This sense of being entitled to this good life, this sense that I deserve and have earned this privilege is a fascinating one to me. I don’t have time to explore it here, but it comes up in race discussions (white privilege) in the current century and should be considered as a legitimate phenomenon. Central College, a small school in Iowa, hosts an annual conference on white privilege, if you are interested.     

One more comment on engagement, service and doing. Winona LaDuc gave a presentation to engineering students about how destructive they ca n be as they follow their zeal and passion to design and build. She told of a story of a dam that was not needed, but was politically sellable, and it gave jobs to engineers. In fact the project stole land from the people who lived there. It denied them their former means of livelihood. It created a reservoir that was so tainted from the trees and items that were emerged in the back water, that fishing was not allowed on the final lake that was constructed. She wondered out loud if it might also be a fun challenge for engineers, to un-build a dam. Maybe they could challenge themselves that way, but un-doing the projects that have failed in the past. We don’t see much of that in life. Also, Ms LaDuc suggested that the driven do-er types might benefit from doing less. Maybe there should be more milling around. It was a terrific presentation. 

One caution here – although it comes at the end, so it is too late for you if you are still reading this. Once you live with this awareness, this appreciation for all trouble and problems, it changes you. Your ability to get down and dirty and feud like crazy with your dam neighbors seems to shift. Or maybe you still irk each other, but you can now have a smile on the inside. You may smile because you see how good you are at being a single unit. This affects the concept of guilt as well. Plus, your passion may abate as your compassion grows for those lousy, irritating, yet gloriously aggravating persons are caught in the act of being themselves.  

One more thing about trouble. Since earth needs lots of good troubling thorny problems, there are masters of trouble who stay here, hover here, and hand it out. Sometimes this kind of pain inflicted on others is beyond our tolerance. We regular souls cannot hurt others at this level. Even in our deepest and most empowering ignorance, the older awareness of our loving divine origins keeps us from being able to be the agents of great harm to others. So there are experts on the planet and in this dimension. They are high level beings who also come to serve. They serve up trouble in very frightening forms. These beings are seen as evil, menacing or psychopathological. They inflict atrocities on others that are beyond our comprehension. Their service is an atypical form of love. They give us the chance to come out from the adventure a changed and deeper spiritual being. I may regret this analogy, but it is a bit like those awful TV survivor shows. The maniacal ones who develop the scenarios to put the players in are somewhat like the trouble experts that ply their trade on this planet. So masters of the human games, ones who help us with our adventure love stories, can be very sinister, even while they are in a divine service. 

So how do we act now, if we believe the case presented here is true? Does this trouble-is-good stuff affect how we live? Does an ego-is-good approach to life affect relations? Well yes, I think so. My spirit teachers say we should continue to be ourselves – the personalities that seem normal to us. Follow our hearts. After all this is all a grand love story. We should try to right the wrongs when we are moved by that intention. Or we should try to simply save ourselves if that seems like what is needed. We still can pick which battles, which stories we are going to participate in – well sometimes. We may avoid the evil ones, unless it was part of an agreement, made by your higher self, before you came in. The higher self sees the glory and goodness in problems a lot more than we do. The local ego-consciousness we are in here, is quite riled and inconvenienced by the problems of day-today living, much less the larger crises that besiege us at times. Maybe we can more easily forgive ourselves for our shortcomings now. Maybe we can forgive others for their actions that seem to need it-given what we know, or think we know about their motives.  

Or we may recognize our stories have harder parts than others. We may have to deal with the evil doers and their services head on. Interactions with the evil ones tends to create more exhilarating dramas. Like involvement with the bad guys might lead to addictions or crime. A person might have some engagement with the prison systems, which can stir up delicious debates on huge moral issues. Take, for instance, capital punishment. And, what is incarceration? Is karma served if prisoners and convicts are fed and coddled? Should prisoners be harmed like their victims were? If the system is not based on an eye-for-an-eye, then is it a safey measure rather than punishment? When does punishment fit the crime? Who says? Should the convicts be rehabbed before going back to society? Should they be educated and get health care when obedient and good citizens cannot afford these luxuries? Is justice served, debts paid, when the sentence is over? How do we handle the cases where the wrong person was punished? The racism and classism of the corrupt system can’t be ignored either. We may despise the perps. Or we may pray for them. We may do both over a lifetime, and see how each of those reactions and emotions affect us. We can participate in the issue, the theme, the meaning, in so many ways. It’s all about us, in some way. Life really seems to be about how we live in the universe that is within us and that is without us. Not only can we say, “It’s only a movie,” but we can also say, ”It’s only a story, a story for me and a few soul mates. It’s only a love story.”   

Another variation on this theme of evil’s role in the world may be that we are affected by an evil that brings us crippling and awful diseases. Our pain and suffering provides opportunities for others to serve us. And if they do not, then we get to see what abandonment and betrayal are like. We may develop a compassion that is deeper than anything possible without such suffering. Or we may be driven to invent cures so others won’t have to endure what we went through, like Gary Young and his wonderful treatments using essential oils. All these are legitimate reactions and are precious experiences that trouble can bring. I will explore themes like this in another essay. For now, I want to say they are all a part of the wonderful menu and troubles make this plane and this planet a place-of-choice for high-end experimenters (those curious children of the divine one,) interested in finding out what love can do.   

So this article is a defense for the great dividers and separators in life, ego, time and space. This is a tribute to trouble. How great is our universe now that they are here to serve us. One more reason I have come to believe this is the consistencies in the stories I hear from people who have passed on. The lack of regret or resentment from the people I talk to after they have died is interesting. Most of them see how hardship was their gift. Most say they’d do it all over again. One person lost his legs in Viet Nam as a young man. He died in his 50’s after spending his whole adulthood dealing with the issues involved with being without both legs. After he passed he came by to visit with my brother, sister-in-law and me. He said the disability, the being a crippled person, brought to him so many precious possibilities that he’d do it all again. Of course there are periods of bitterness, but even then there is value in going through such a phase. At another time, one man who died of cancer also said he would do it all again. Now that he sees what it brought him, and how it grabbed the hearts of those who loved him he would not want to change any part of that lifetime, including the slow and painful process of leaving.  

Oh, and another thing. One fabulous feature of this universe of follies and foibles is the great ability we have to forget. So, although we can appreciate trouble in an intellectual way in an article like this, when it comes knocking on our door, it feels absolutely real and we are swept into the gory details of the story again. Like novices, victims, champions and stoolies we get involved in the story again and again. Beings of love, caught in the act of being ourselves. It is so engaging and seems so real, that we are swept up in the experience, and it is experience that is the expression of love and the lesson of love and the lasting gift that goes even beyond the graves, with us. Hooray, we are not denied the beauty of the experience just because we had an inside peek, or a tip from a dead person who sees from over there. We have occasional insights of our own to the meaning of all of this action in life, but we are not totally kept out of it by knowledge alone. Like the survivors and persons in the reality TV shows, they know it is a set-up, but it is real to them while it is happening, until you call it quits and walk away. But as you walk away, you do so as a bigger person with a greater capacity than you had before the trying experience.    

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